Wednesday, 3 April 2013

Sir Nicholas Stern - a leading contemporary charlatan - has again been performing one of his confidence tricks

A Renaissance mountebank by Hieronymus Bosch. (image by wikipedia)

"A charlatan (also called swindler or mountebank) is a person practicing quackery or some similar confidence trick in order to obtain money, fame or other advantages via some form of pretense or deception."Nicholas Herbert Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford, the former chief economist for the World Bank, now a leading contemporary mountebank, has again been performing one of his traditional "confidence tricks", this time at an IMF meeting: Without changes to emission trends, the planet has roughly a 50 percent chance that temperatures will soar to five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial averages in a century, he said.

“We haven’t been above five degrees Centigrade on this planet for about 30 million years. So you can see that this is radical change way outside human experience,” Stern said in an address at the International Monetary Fund.

“When we were at three degrees Centigrade three million years ago, the sea levels were about 20 some meters (65 feet) above now. On sea level rise of just two meters, probably a couple of hundred million people would have to move,” he said.

Stern said that other effects would come more quickly including the expansion of deserts and the melting of Himalayan snows that supply rivers on which up to two billion people depend.

Even if nations fulfill pledges made in 2010 at a UN-led conference in Cancun, Mexico, the world would be on track to warming of four degrees (7.2 Fahrenheit), he said.With the knowledge that "global warming" stopped at least 16 years ago, it is becoming increasingly difficult to understand why a charlatan like Stern is still invited to speak as an "expert" at IMF and other similar gatherings. Most likely these people actually want to be conned, in order to be able to avoid making real decisions about real global problems.